Visiting Scholar

RSF Visiting Scholar Paola Guiliano has co-published a paper in the February 2013 issue of Oxford Quarterly Journal of Economics, drawing on research undertaken here at Russell Sage on the agricultural roots—and persistence—of gender roles. The abstract begins:

The study examines the historical origins of existing cross-cultural differences in beliefs and values regarding the appropriate role of women in society. We test the hypothesis that traditional agricultural practices influenced the historical gender division of labor and the evolution of gender norms.

Building off of the hypothesis put forth by Ester Boserup (1970), that “gender roles have their origins in the form of agriculture traditionally practiced in the pre-industrial period,” Guiliano and her co-authors gathered data culled from pre-industrial ethnographic data as well as contemporary surveys individuals’ views on gender roles and women’s place in society. In particular, the authors looked for the adoption and persistence of plough agriculture, which requires “significant upper body strength, grip strength, and bursts of power…to either pull the plough or control the animal that pulls it.” Because of such intense physical demands, plough agriculture offered more opportunities for men in agricultural roles, relegating most women to work inside the home. The authors continue:

We find that, consistent with existing hypotheses, the descendants of societies that traditionally practiced plough agriculture today have less equal gender norms, measured using reported gender-role attitudes and female participation in the workplace, politics, and entrepreneurial activities. Our results hold looking across countries, across districts within countries, and across ethnicities within districts. To test for the importance of cultural persistence, we examine the children of immigrants living in Europe and the United States. We find that even among these individuals, all born and raised in the same country, those with a heritage of traditional plough use exhibit less equal beliefs about gender roles today.

RSF Visiting Scholar Jo Carol Phelan has co-published a new paper in the latest American Sociological Review. Here is the abstract:

Could the explosion of genetic research in recent decades affect our conceptions of race? In Backdoor to Eugenics, Duster argues that reports of specific racial differences in genetic bases of disease, in part because they are presented as objective facts whose social implications are not readily apparent, may heighten public belief in more pervasive racial differences. We tested this hypothesis with a multi-method study. A content analysis showed that news articles discussing racial differences in genetic bases of disease increased significantly between 1985 and 2008 and were significantly less likely than non–health-related articles about race and genetics to discuss social implications. A survey experiment conducted with a nationally representative sample of 559 adults found that a news-story vignette reporting a specific racial difference in genetic risk for heart attacks (the Backdoor Vignette) produced significantly greater belief in essential racial differences than did a vignette portraying race as a social construction or a no-vignette condition. The Backdoor Vignette produced beliefs in essential racial differences that were virtually identical to those produced by a vignette portraying race as a genetic reality. These results suggest that an unintended consequence of the genomic revolution may be the reinvigoration of age-old beliefs in essential racial differences.

RSF Visiting Scholar Sapna Cheryan has co-published a new article in this month's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Here is the abstract:

Five studies show that being the target of a positive stereotype is a negative interpersonal experience for those from individualistic cultures because positive stereotypes interfere with their desire to be seen as individuals separate from their groups. U.S.-born Asian Americans and women who heard a positive stereotype about their group in an intergroup interaction (e.g., “Asians are good at math,” “women are nurturing”) derogated their partner and experienced greater negative emotions than those who heard no stereotype. Negative reactions were mediated by a sense of being depersonalized, or “lumped together” with others in one's group, by the positive stereotype (Studies 1–3). Cross-cultural differences (Study 4) and an experimental manipulation of cultural self-construal (Study 5) demonstrated that those with an independent self-construal reacted more negatively to positive stereotypes than those with an interdependent self-construal. By bringing together research on stereotypes from the target's perspective with research on culture, this work demonstrates how cultural self-construals inform the way people interpret and respond to being the target of positive stereotypes.

RSF Visiting Scholar Jo Carol Phelan co-published a paper with Jeffrey W. Lucas in the December issue of the Social Psychology Quarterly. Here is the abstract:

This article explicates and distinguishes the processes that produce status orders and those that produce stigmatization. It describes an experimental study in which participants were assigned interaction partners before completing a task where they had opportunities to be influenced by the partners and opportunities to socially reject the partners. Results show clear influence effects of educational attainment and mental illness but no effects for physical disability. Social distance effects are present for mental illness and physical disability but not for educational attainment. Results additionally show that stigmatizing attributes combine with task ability in affecting influence and also suggest that task ability may reduce social rejection. These results indicate that stigmatizing attributes combine with status markers in a way similar to previously studied status attributes. The findings extend traditions of research on status and stigma while also having potentially important implications for strategies to reduce inequalities based on mental illness.

In an essay on the Newtown killings, visiting scholar Edward Mulvey argues that it is extremely difficult for mental health professionals to predict when patients with mental disorders may turn to violence. "There are a large number of withdrawn, socially awkward young men in our society; some have mental disorders and some don't," Mulvey writes. "We simply cannot predict which ones will go on a shooting rampage. It's like looking for a needle in a haystack; you will probably only know where it is when it pricks your finger."

Mulvey, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, argues that policymakers and families should instead focus on providing support and treatment to those with a mental illness:

We will only know what is happening in a troubled person's mind by talking to them regularly before they are desperate. The idea of identifying, ostracizing and restricting them is not only inhuman, but impossible. We need to embrace them as members of our community who are facing immense struggles.

The December issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology has published a paper by former RSF Visiting Scholar Elizabeth Levy Paluck and Hana Shepherd. Entitled "The Salience of Social Referents: A Field Experiment on Collective Norms and Harassment Behavior in a School Social Network," the paper examines how norms in high school develop and whether they can be changed. Here is the abstract:

Persistent, widespread harassment in schools can be understood as a product of collective school norms that deem harassment, and behavior allowing harassment to escalate, as typical and even desirable. Thus, one approach to reducing harassment is to change students' perceptions of these collective norms. Theory suggests that the public behavior of highly connected and chronically salient actors in a group, called social referents, may provide influential cues for individuals' perception of collective norms. Using repeated, complete social network surveys of a public high school, we demonstrate that changing the public behavior of a randomly assigned subset of student social referents changes their peers' perceptions of school collective norms and their harassment behavior. Social referents exert their influence over peers' perceptions of collective norms through the mechanism of everyday social interaction, particularly interaction that is frequent and personally motivated, in contrast to interaction shaped by institutional channels like shared classes. These findings clarify the development of collective social norms: They depend on certain patterns of and motivations for social interactions within groups across time, and are not static but constantly reshaped and reproduced through these interactions. Understanding this process creates opportunities for changing collective norms and behavior.

Court-ordered school desegregation, perhaps most famously highlighted by Brown v. Board of Education, has been described as among the most ambitious and controversial social experiments of the past fifty years. But what do we know about the long-run impact of school desegregation on students' lives?

In an engaging TEDx talk, former RSF Visiting Scholar Rucker Johnson, argues that desegregation had a major effect on school quality and yielded substantial increases in educational attainment and adult earnings among black students. Johnson argues that two key non-racial aspects of integration -- an increase in per-pupil spending and a reduction in class sizes among blacks -- played a substantial role in helping black students. Watch below for more:

In an essay published this week on GOOD.is, Becky Pettit, the author of Invisible Men: Mass Incarceration and the Myth of Black Progress, explains the impact of excluding inmates and other disadvantaged groups on conventional data:

During the Great Depression, the federal government began collecting data in between census years through the Sample Survey of Unemployment—which in 1942 became the Current Population Survey, a monthly survey of 50,000 to 60,000 individuals living in households. We continue to collect and use this data to design and evaluate public policy and determine how to distribute federal money. Reports that the unemployment rate dropped to 7.8 percent in September, for example, come from data collected through the Current Population Survey.

Here's the problem: Those data don't include some of the most disadvantaged segments of the population—people who are highly mobile, people who don't live in households, or people who reside in prisons and jails. The most recent Current Population Survey data show that in 2008, 13.5 percent of black men between 20-34 years old didn’t finish high school or an equivalency degree. But, including inmates in estimates of high school completion suggests a nationwide dropout rate among young black men of 19 percent—more than 40 percent higher than conventional estimates.

Including inmates shows that there has been no improvement in the black-white gap in high school completion among men since at least the early 1990s and the racial gap in high school completion has hovered close to its current level of 11 percentage points for most of the past 20 years. Moreover, young black male dropouts are more likely to be in prison or jail than they are to be employed.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments this week in Fisher v. University of Texas, which raises questions about the use of race in admissions to American universities. Sigal Alon, currently a RSF Visiting Scholar, has published several studies dealing with admission, affirmative action and financial aid policies in post-secondary education. Below, she answers questions about her research and affirmative action in the United States.

Q: Let’s first look at the Top 10 Percent admission rule in Texas. Give us some background on the policy – why was it enacted, and how is it different from the previous admission rule in Texas? What can you tell us about the Fisher v. Texas case?

A: Following a judicial ban on the use of race preferences in college admissions in Texas (imposed by the 1996 Hopwood decision) the Texas legislature passed H.B. 588, which guarantees seniors who graduate in the top 10 percent of their class admission to any Texas public college or university. In University of Texas, Austin, the flagship institution in the state, for example, it accounts for 80 percent of the entering freshman class. Abigail Noel Fisher applied to UT-Austin in 2008 (at the time she was a senior at Stephen F. Austin High School in Sugar Land, TX). She did not qualify under the automatic Top Ten Percent program so she had to compete with others for the remaining 20 percent of seats. Admissions decisions for students who do not graduate in the top 10 percent of their class are based on a broad range of objective and subjective criteria. Since 2005 (following the Grutter decision) UT added race to the list of factors they considered in making the admission decision. In essence they have implemented a race-conscious admissions policy for applicants who are not in the Top Ten Percent. The motivation: bring racial and ethnic diversity at the university closer to the state’s overall population diversity, especially at the classroom level and in the major field of study. Fisher sued the UT, contending that her academic credentials exceed those of minority students who were admitted.

More Research on Diversity in Higher Education
• Website: Sigal Alon
• Paper: "The Diversity Dividends of a Need-blind and Color-blind Affirmative Action Policy"
• Paper: "Affirmative Action and the Texas Top 10% Percent Admission Law: Balancing Equity and Access to Higher Education"
• Paper: "The Evolution of Class Inequality in Higher Education"

Q: In a study co-authored with Marta Tienda and Sunny X. Niu, you examined the impact of the 10 percent rule. Can we say that the rule lead to more diversity in Texas universities?

A: The need of UT-Austin to implement a race-based admissions policy arises because the percent plan did not generate enough racial and ethnic diversity to meet the changing demographic composition of high school graduation cohorts. This is not surprising because, by default, any race-neutral policy cannot produce the same level of demographic diversity as race-conscious admissions tools. Moreover, while the plan was successful in broadening geographic diversity, it failed to augment socioeconomic diversity.

In the latest installment of our Election 2012 series, political scientist and RSF Visiting Scholar Neil Malhotra discusses his research on retrospective voting and voter competence.

Q: In his book, Just How Stupid Are We?, the popular historian Rick Shenkman writes, "The consensus in the political science profession is that voters are rational." Before we go into the literature, I wanted to ask you to give your own assessment: How strong is the evidence that voters are rational? Would you agree with Shenkman’s conclusion?

A: I'll quote Vanderbilt political science professor Larry Bartels' response to Shenkman: "Well, no." If anything, the consensus in political science is that voters are uninformed and do not have well-structured preferences. Nonetheless, I think the question of whether voters are rational or irrational is not the right one. The important question is: Under what conditions does the American electorate collectively make decisions that benefit society and promote democratic accountability? That's a much tougher and more important question, I think.

More Research on Voting
• Website: Neil Malhotra
• Paper: "Random Events, Economic Losses, and Retrospective Voting: Implications for Democratic Competence"
• Paper: "Irrelevant Events Affect Voters' Evaluations of Government Performance"

Q: Let’s look at how political scientists have approached this question over the years. Let’s say I conducted a series of studies to find how much voters know about government, such as, "Who is the President?" or "What does the Federal Reserve do?" If I found that most people didn’t know the answers, could I conclude anything about voters' competence?

A: I don't think so. Skip Lupia of Michigan has rightly pointed out the question should not be "What do voters know or not know?" but rather "What do voters need to know?" Why is knowing the name of the Chief Justice an important or necessary job for voters? Indeed, the proponents of a research agenda called "retrospective voting" noted that voters actually need to perform fairly simple tasks: evaluate the health of the country and reward/punish the incumbent accordingly.